We believe the retail wine price where you get the best wine for your money is $12-$20….sure, we stock wines less expensive and many which cost more, but we focus on $12-$20. Wine tastes better when you underpay for it and we pride ourselves in finding wines that taste more expensive than they are!

Folks who are shopping for wine often have two things in mind… the color, red or white… and about how much they want to spend. The more confidence customers have in the store's selection, the more they will spend.  In retail, conventional wisdom says: what sells is either the cheapest or what is considered the best and therefore is expensive.  Most of our wines fall in the middle, between $10 and $25.  Here's why…

1.  $5.99-$8.99… In the trade this is where most retailers focus, where the bulk of the sales are.  This is the magical price point where customers will happily, impulsively pick up a bottle and sometimes a case.  Brands like Yellow Tail, Smoking Loon, Toasted Head, and Turning Leaf are all professionally conceived brands where marketing firms concoct "cool" labels and branding to enhance the popularity of these inexpensive choices.  If you do the math, and I have, in order to achieve $7.99 on the retail shelf the actual juice, the wine, has to cost almost nothing.  Often these wines are made using the popular corporate mantra of "better living through modern chemistry" to achieve the low price point.  Wine does not require an ingredient panel or any disclosure about how the grapes made their way to wine.  These wines are to wine what particleboard is to wood… they fulfill a function, but the aesthetic leaves a bit to be desired.

2.  $35.00 and up… Famous,expensive, and prestigious wines are in demand, highly sought after and collected. They sell well.Not as well as they did in 2007. These wines are famous and collected… Silver Oak Cabernet, Chateau Latour, and Chateau de Beaucastel, to name a few.  Because they are popular, they are written up and evaluated in the monthly wine journals and cellared by wine enthusiasts.

3.  The "Sweetspot" $12-$20... These are the wines we are selling and promoting.  This is how much you have to pay in order to experience authentic flavor, the "sweet spot" where you can buy wines that taste complex and alive.  Some folks have called the wines we have at 3CUPS "invisible" because they fly underneath the radar screen of the wine press and because of the authentic nature of the farming, cannot slip under the magical price point of ten bucks!  Our wines include obscure grape varieties like Counoise, Albarino, or Frappato… or hail from little-acclaimed regions such as Bizkaiko Txakolina.